


The Spectre of the Rose

by kvikindi



Category: Lewis (TV)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-06-26
Updated: 2016-06-26
Packaged: 2018-07-18 07:46:41
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 963
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7305886
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kvikindi/pseuds/kvikindi
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>“Stat rosa pristina nomine, nomina nuda tenemus... <i>Only in name abides the rose of yesteryear; we possess only naked names.</i> Bernard of Cluny. Only he didn’t say that; he was talking about Rome, not roses. It was a misprint.”</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Spectre of the Rose

**Author's Note:**

> [justanotherbildungsroman](http://justanotherbildungsroman.tumblr.com) on tumblr prompted me with "stat rosa pristina nomine, nomina nuda tenemus," but the resulting ficlet was too long to post there.
> 
> Title from T.S. Eliot's "Little Gidding," which Hathaway also quotes (in addition to the better-known phrases from Gertrude Stein and Shakespeare).

Later, when Dana Wrexham is on trial for the murders of Alan Frost and Kim Windsor, Lewis and Hathaway will have to revisit the crime scene photos, and they will remember that people have died, and not in very nice ways, and they will feel that it had been cheap to philosophize about the flowers. At the time, though, they are punch-drunk on lack of sleep and too much coffee, and really, Lewis thinks, really, it had been a ridiculous case: thievery, murder, family rivalries, a garden show in shambles, a greenhouse burnt down— all over what was supposed to a cutting from one of Napoleon’s rosebushes, but which (it turned out) wasn’t.

(Or, all right, not Napoleon’s rosebushes. Hathaway had explained: “His wife’s. Well, one of his wives’, anyway. Josephine de Beauharnais. She wanted one of every kind of rose in the world. She had more than two hundred varieties. Most of them don’t exist anymore.” Apparently this had been at Malmaison: not the posh hotel, but a great honking chateau near Paris. Lewis still prefers to think of the roses as Napoleon’s, both because it’s simpler and because it gives him great pleasure to imagine Napoleon— who in Lewis’s head is a little sort of cartoon-looking fellow with a silly hat and a severe expression— doing a bit of ornamental gardening.)

“A rose is a rose is a rose is a rose,” Hathaway says, leaning against Wrexham’s pergola and smoking pensively, as though he is trying to appear like one of those Romantic poets. Or does Lewis mean some other kind of poet? It’s hard to keep them straight; they all seem to have spent a lot of time leaning against things. Reclining. The clothes were the only part that ever changed.

“Somehow I don’t think Dana Wrexham would agree,” Lewis says. “She was after a specific rose.” Heartbroken, too, not to have got it. Imagine being so hung up on a bit of a twig! 

“Mm,” Hathaway says. “Stat rosa pristina nomine, nomina nuda tenemus.”

“What’s that? Something about being nude?”

“ _Only in name abides the rose of yesteryear; we possess only naked names._ Bernard of Cluny. Only he didn’t say that; he was talking about Rome, not roses. It was a misprint.” 

“You’ve lost me, either way.”

“In short, sir: everything now is rubbish, and things were better back in the good old days. Snows were snowier, heroes were hero-ier, and, well, roses were rosier.”

“Ah. I see what you mean.” Lewis thinks about it. “It’s at least a little bit true, though. I mean, there was a rose, this, what do you call it, Grand Busy—

“Gran Bisou de la Rochefoucauld,” Hathaway interrupts with a visible wince. 

“Yeah. And now it’s gone. All we’ve got left of it is the name."

Hathaway narrows his eyes, looking as though he suspects Lewis of deliberately concealing some insight. “Yes,” he says slowly. 

“Just makes you think, that’s all. Things we’ve lost.” He can tell that Hathaway thinks he knows what Lewis is thinking, that Hathaway thinks he knows that Lewis is thinking of a particular name. But the truth is, his life is full of naked names. Even his children are sometimes strangers. Lyn-the-mother: so distant in so many different, heartbreaking ways from the girl who’d wanted a Paddington Bear for Christmas, or the red-faced newborn who clutched at his thumb with her hand— animal, almost; his first thought: Can this really be a person? 

From Lyn came his grandson: an astonishing act of generation. That bairn too will grow up, and Lewis will see it if he’s lucky.

Hathaway says, “I think I have to believe that things get better.” 

“I’d settle for a nice status quo, me.”

Hathaway adopts the distinct expression that signals a quotation. “The moment of the rose and the moment of the yew-tree are of equal duration?” 

Lewis levels a theatrically appalled look at him. Hathaway shakes his head and smiles a secret, private smile. 

“Nothing, sir. What you said. Sort of.”

“Now, why does that kind of comment make me nervous?” Lewis sticks his hands in his pockets, shifting his posture, signalling it’s time to go: away from this garden, down the nick or down the pub. 

He knows why Hathaway’s throwaway quips should make him nervous: does that little bell of devotion Hathaway always seems to be ringing cause him to hear things? Does he write too much wisdom into the gaps of things that Lewis does and doesn’t say? At the same time, Lewis sometimes feels that Hathaway’s translating for him, though: it’s the other way round, he is certain Hathaway would insist. 

As they’re leaving, Hathaway stoops and plucks a white rose from one of the bushes. He presents it to Lewis, deftly avoiding the little thorns that prickle it. “I have,” he announces, “absolutely no idea how old this rose is, or what it’s called. But as I’m sure you’ll agree, a rose by any other name would smell as sweet.”

Lewis rolls his eyes, but gingerly accepts the thorny flower. He’ll set the thing in one of the car’s cup holders and forget about it, then find it the next day, dried by the summer heat, with leaves like old paper. He’ll feel a surge of fondness, looking at it. Who needs Napoleon’s roses, he’ll think. Those little French hotel-chain roses with their unpronounceable and naked names. This is the rose his strange sergeant plucked out of an Oxford garden, just after the two of them caught a murderer, before they went for a drink. Lewis will take it home and tuck it into a box, and the rose will stay there, accumulating time like a coating of dust, like interest towards a debt it hopes to repay.


End file.
